Home › The World's Kitchen › Cherry Pie
Cherry Pie
Remove the stems and stone one and a half pounds of sound, ripe fresh cherries; place them in a bowl with two ounces of sugar and two tablespoons kirsch, mix well, then proceed to prepare and bake the pie
This is a filling, not a whole pie: the book assumes you already know how to line a plate with pastry and bake it. A few gaps are worth filling before you start.
- What the weight gives youA pound and a half of cherries comes to roughly 4 cups of pitted fruit, enough for one 9-inch double-crust pie. Note that the recipe weighs the cherries before stemming and stoning, so 1 1/2 lb as bought is what seems to be meant.
- Two ounces of sugar is not muchAbout 1/4 cup, which suits genuinely sweet dessert cherries such as Bing. Sour or Morello cherries, common in American pie recipes, would want three to four times that amount.
- The missing thickenerSugar and kirsch draw out a good deal of juice as the fruit stands, and nothing here binds it. Toss the macerated fruit with about 3 tablespoons of cornstarch or 1/3 to 1/2 cup of flour, or drain the juice, reduce it, and return it, or the bottom crust will be soaked.
- KirschKirschwasser, the clear unsweetened cherry brandy associated with the Black Forest, Alsace and Switzerland, not a sweet cherry liqueur or maraschino. Two tablespoons is a flavouring, not a soaking; some of the alcohol cooks off in the oven.
- OvenThe book leaves the baking to you. A double-crust fruit pie wants a hot start, 425F for 15 to 20 minutes to set the bottom, then 350F for 35 to 45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- PittingA hand pitter keeps the fruit whole and the juice in the bowl. Doing it over the sugar bowl rather than the sink saves whatever escapes.
- ServingEight slices. Let the pie cool at least two hours; cherry filling thickened with starch is soup while hot.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and his cookbooks reflect a professional's habit of writing for people who already know the basics -- hence a cherry pie that describes only the fruit and waves at the pastry. The kirsch may be a hint that this recipe belongs to the more European side of the collection: unsweetened cherry brandy from the Black Forest and the Swiss cantons is the traditional partner to cooked cherries there, as in Schwarzwald desserts and cherry compotes, while the American pie tradition of the same period leaned on sour cherries and a good deal more sugar. One might read Filippini as splitting the difference, treating the pie shell as an American given and the filling as something a Continental cook would recognise.